PEASANT MOVEMENTS AT THE EVE OF INDEPENDENCE AND AFTERWARDS
This movement was launched in the state of Andhra Pradesh against the former Nizam of Hyderabad. The agrarian social structure in the Nizam’s Hyderabad was of a feudal order. It had two kinds of land tenure systems, namely, raiyatwari and jagirdari. Under the raiyatwari system, the peasants owned patta and were proprietors of the land; they were registered occupants. The actual cultivators of the land were known as shikmidars. Khalsa lands were chieftain’s lands, and out of revenue collected from these lands, personal expenses of the royalty were met out. The Deshmukhs and Deshpandes were the hereditary collectors of revenue for khalsa villages. In jagir villages, the tax was collected through jagindars and their agents. Both the jagirders and the Deshmukhs wielded immense power at the local level.
The region of Telangana was characterised by a feudal economy. The main commercial crops, viz., groundnut, tobacco and castor seed, were the monopoly of the landowning brahmins. The rise of Reddis and peasant proprietors further strengthened the high castes and propertied class. The non-cultivating urban groups, mostly Brahmins, Marwaris, Komtis and Muslims, began to take interest in acquiring land. Consequently, the peasant proprietors slided down to the status of tenants-at-will, share-croppers and landless labourers.
Following were the main causes of the movement:
The Nizam’s former Hyderabad state had a feudal structure of administration. In the jagir area, the agents of the jagirdar who were the middlemen, collected the land taxes. There was much of op pression by the jagirdar and his agents. They were free to extort from the actual cultivators a variety of taxes. This condition of exploitation remained in practice till the jagirdari system was abolished in 1949.
On the other hand the khalsa land or the raiyarueri system was also exploitative though the severity of exploitation in the khalsa system was a little lesser. In the khalsa villages, the Deshmukhs and Deshpandes worked as intermediaries. They were not in the pay roll of the jagir administration; they were only given a percentage or the total land collection made by them. The Deshmukhs and Deshpandes then developed a habit to cheat the peasants by creating fraud in the land records. This, in countless instances they reduced the actual cultivator to the status of tenant-at-will or a landless labourer.
In both the systems of administration, i.e., jagir and khalsa, the peasants were exploited by the intermediaries appointed by Nizam. High taxes, fraud with the record and exploitation resulted in creating discontent among the poor peasants.
(2) Yet another cause of peasant movement in Telangana was the exploitation of the big peasants. D.N. Dhanagare informs that the jagirdars and the Deshmukhs had thousands of acres of land in their possession. The families of these big peasants and their heads were called Durra or Dora. It means, the master or lord of the village. Dhanagare says that the Dora exploited the small peasants and agricultural labourers. This exploitation, in course of time, became legitimised with the big farmers. It was considered to be the privilege of the Dora to exploit the masses of peasants. Dhanagare observes:
Such exaction had become somewhat legitimised by what was known as the verzi system under which a landlord or a Deshmukh could force a family from among his customary retainers to cultivate his land and to do one job or the other-whether domestic, agricultural or official, as an obligation to the master
(3) In the whole former state of Nizam a system of slavery, quite like that of Hali of south Gujarat, was prevalent. This system was known as Bhagela. The Bhagela were drawn mostly from aboriginal tribes who were tied to the master by debt. According to Bhagela system, the tenant who had taken loan from the landlord was obliged to serve him till the debt is repaid. In most of the cases, the Bhagela was required to serve the landlord for generations.
(4) The Reddis and Kammars were notable castes who traditionally worked as traders and moneylenders. They exercised a great deal of influence in the countryside. They wanted to pull down the dominance of Brahmins as agriculturists in the state.
(5) The Telangana region was economically backward. The development of agriculture depended on the facilities of irrigation. The commercial crops could hardly be taken without irrigation facilities. Though, the lack of irrigation was realised by Nizam and he provided irrigation facilities to the peasants both in khalsa and jagir villages. But, these facilities were largely cornered by the big farmers.
(6) Land alienation was not new to the former Hyderabad state. Between 1910 to 1940, the frequency of land dispossession increased. On the one hand, the land possessed by the non cultivating urban people, mostly Brahmins, Marwaris, and Muslims increased and on the other hand the tribal peasants got reduced to the status of marginal farmers and landless labourers. Describing the impact of land alienation on the poorer peasants.
As a result of growing land alienation many actual occupants or cultivators were being reduced to tenants-at-will, sharecroppers or landless labourers… in fact, where rich Pattadars held holdings too large to manage, they tended to keep a certain amount of irrigated land to be cultivated with the help of hired labour and turned over most of their dry lands either to Bhagela serfs or to tenant cultivators on very high produce rents.
The Telangana peasant unrest did not erupt over night. It took about three to four decades. Actually, till 1930, the poor condition of the peasants had reached its culmination. Meanwhile, there had been much transformation in agricultural economy. The Telangana economy, which was only subsistence economy, had grown into market economy by the 1940s. With the change in capitalistic agricultural economy, there was no change in the status of the tenants and share croppers. Actually, the modes of production and exchange remained pre-capitalist or semi-feudal and emerged as the major source of dis content among the poor peasantry in Telangana. On the other hand, with the termination of Second World War, there was a terrible fall in wholesale prices. The price trends strengthened the position of moneylenders and traders who tightened their grip on indebted small Pattadars and tenants. One of the bitter consequences of the forces of change has been an increase in the number of agricultural labourers. It appears that there was enough discontent among the lower segments of peasantry. Peasants were only waiting for some opportunity to engineer some insurrection.
The course of events that led to the Telangana peasant struggle can be described as under:
(1) The Telangana peasant movement was engineered by Communist Party of India (CPI). It is said to be a revolution committed by Communists. The Communist Party started working in Telangana in 1936. Professor N.G. Ranga had laid down the regional level peasant organisation in Telangana. This regional organisation was affiliated to the All India Kisan Sabha-an organ of CPI. Within a period of three or four years, say by 1940, the CPI had established its roots in the former Hyderabad state. During the period from 1944 to 1946, the Communist activities increased in several of the districts of Hydera bad. A proper framework was, therefore, prepared for launching a peasant movement in Telangana.
The next event which took place in Hyderabad and more actually in Telangana was the famine of 1946. All the crops failed and there was a crisis of the availability of fodder. The prices of food, fodder and other necessities of life increased. This was a crisis for the tenants and the sharecroppers. Actually, the year 1946 provided all opportunities for engineering the peasant struggle. In the early July 1946, the peasants resisted the government orders. Militant action was taken by the CPI-led peasants.
(3) The CPI made an objective to mobilise the peasants. It took up a campaign to propagate the demands of the lower peasants. By the middle of 1946, the Communist propaganda was fully intensified and covered about 300 to 400 villages under its influence. The movement during this period was slow but the peasants showed enough resistance to the government dictates. However, it must be mentioned that in the mobilisation of peasantry, only Telangana local peasants participated.
(4) The second conference of CPI was held in March 1948. It re solved to give a revolutionary turn to the peasant movement in Telangana. The peasants later on were organised into an army and in termittently fought guerrilla wars. The course of events of Telangana peasant struggle Hamza Alavi observes:
Telangana movement had a Guerrilla army of about 5,000. The peasants killed or drove out the landlords and the local bureaucrats and seized and distributed the land. They established governments of peasant ‘soviets’ which were integrated regionally into a control organisation. Peasant rule was established in an area of 15,000 sq. miles. with a population of four million. The government of the armed peasantry continued until 1950, it was not finally crushed until the following year. Today, the area remains one of the political strong holds of the Communist Party.
(5) Besides the peasant agitation, a parallel discontent was also taking place in Hyderabad. A para-military voluntary force, organised by Kasim Rizvi, was taking its roots. The members of this voluntary organisation were known as Razakars. This organisation was against the peasants. The peasants consolidated their movement in the face of the oppression of Nizam, activities of Razakars and the authority crisis in Hyderabad.
(6) On September 13, 1948, the Indian army marched into Hyderabad and within less than a week the Nizam’s army, police and the Razakers surrendered without resistance. The police action, taken by the newly framed Central Government of independent India, was very quick to suppress the peasant movement. D.N. Dhanagare elaborates the police action as under:
On India’s part the police action was taken to stop the Razkar frenzies as they not only created anarchic conditions within the state but also posed a serious threat to the internal security of neighbouring Indian territory. The police action was, therefore, unsavoury but essential … once the Razakars were overpowered, and a military ad ministration set up… the offensive was immediately directed at the peasant rebels in the troubled districts of Telangana. The superior Indian army spared no measure to suppress the communist squads.
The peasant movement in Telangana had to be withdrawn. Actually the police action gave a death blow to the Communist-led Telangana peasant movement. In this struggle, the movement had to suffer a lot. Fighting with the Indian army over 2,000 peasants and party workers were killed. By August 1949, nearly 25,000 Commu nists and active participants were arrested; by July 1950 the total number of detainees had reached 10,000. This should suffice as an index of the intensity of Telangana peasants struggle. The Telangana peasant movement continued for about five years. Its outcomes can be enumerated as below:
(1) The struggle had he participation of a mixed class of peasantry. Though the rich peasants, mainly the Brahmins, had their involvement in the struggle, the major achievement was that the struggle for the first time brought together the tenants, sharecroppers and the landless labourers. This was by all means a very big achievement of the struggle. The Kammar and the Reddy castes who belonged to the rich class of peasants though gained enough but the movement consolidated the strength of poor peasants, particularly the tribals, who were the victims of vetti-the bonded labour.
(2) Yet another benefit of this struggle was in the favour of the Communist Party. The Communist, for a long time to come, exercised their hegemony over the entire state of Hyderabad.
(3) Though the Communist Party, as a whole, benefited from the Telangana peasant struggle, it had its own losses also. Ideologically, the party got split from top to bottom. One group of Communists supported the struggle while other decried. The second group argued that the struggle was in no case less than terrorism.
(4) So far the demands of the poor agricultural classes were concerned the movement was a failure. Surely, there were some gains to Kammar and Reddy-the rich peasant, but the gains of the poor peasants such as sharecroppers were quite meagre.
The Telangana peasant struggle, it must be boldly said, was from above and not from the peasants themselves. No single agrarian stratum initiated the movement. It was all the handy work of the Communist Party. Despite the failure story of Telangana struggle it must be admitted that it was a source of inspiration for the Communists as a whole in the country. D.N. Dhanagare very rightly makes his conclusive statement about the outcome of the movement when he says:
… Telangana insurrection was no more successful than other peasant resistance movements in India. Like all other movements, though, the Telangana struggle has become the source of legends and inspiration for the radical left in India. Recently, there has been renewed interests, academic as well as political, in the study of the Telangana struggle, its silver jubilee celebrated by all shades of Communist Party in India, became, however, an occasion for mutual mud-slinging; but that must be left out of this study.
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